Leaderboards

jasonrohrer · 2014-11-21 02:47:35

Leaders by Games Played -- (day) (week) (month) (year)

Leaders by Dollar Balance

Leaders by Dollar Profit -- (day) (week) (month) (year)

Leaders by Profit Ratio -- (day) (week) (month) (year) (relative to total table buy-in)

Leaders by Win-Loss Ratio (dollars won over dollars lost)

Leaders by Elo rating

Provisional Elo ratings (for players who have played 20 games or fewer)

See also: How Elo ratings work

.. · 2014-11-22 12:30:58

These scoreboards are very nice to have. But the profit ratio scoreboard is pretty meaningless because it's a function of how much money you transferred into your account, rather than the amount of money you've actually bet. A scoreboard that actually measures the (weighted) fraction of the time that you win is what would be most interesting and maximum boast value. I think that per round (a single pot) and per game (until someone leaves) would give the same result. I imagine that you would have to explicitly track the total bet amount per player though.

Last edited by .. (2014-11-22 12:35:42)

Asminthe · 2014-11-22 18:14:43

While I agree that the current profit ratio calculation has problems (like making me wish I'd deposited less and grinded my way up from a tiny starting amount), it wouldn't be a particularly good measurement if it were based on the ratio of winnings to bet sizes either. It is eventually going to be much, much easier to play at very small stakes than high ones, so comparing someone who makes 5 cents at $0.01 games to someone who makes $500 at $100 games is not even close to fair.

One possible alternative would be to have separate leaderboards for various ranges of buy-ins. Then people could see how well they stack up to other players who play for similar stakes.

jasonrohrer · 2014-11-22 19:19:54

Yeah, this stuff will be tweaked eventually, and new leaderboards can be added. All the data is in a MySQL database, so basically any query we can dream up, we can make a leaderboard out of.

The point of getting those in place now was to give us something to start with and support time-limited tournaments (where the dollar balance leaderboard will actually be the winner's leaderboard).

mzo · 2014-12-12 01:29:22

Awww I like the profit ratio one because I'm the top player on it lol. It's the only leaderboard I'm good at. I started playing with $1.55 and am up to around $3.60!

jere · 2014-12-12 01:51:56

Nice! You've knocked down INSTITUTE DEED who was #1 on both the ratio and profit boards for quite a while now...

mzo · 2014-12-12 03:52:05

Yeah that punk had a good lead on me till someone went all in on a $0.77 game. Kept that recording hehe.

jere · 2014-12-12 13:09:29

Creature Expression has finally made it to the top of profit/ratio leader boards. I'm sure I will be knocked down soon, so I have to gloat a little.

mzo · 2014-12-12 13:24:17

Well played!

jere · 2014-12-14 22:46:42

Ok, I promise I'll stop after this but I hit #1 on all three. Even though the dollar balance one is probably the most meaningless leaderboard (because a wealthy player can immediately get to the top), it still trips something in my brain that says: must climb this. I think this kind of mindset actually drives a lot of success of games like LoL because you're always trying to get to a higher level, then to a higher division, etc.

I was wondering about how easily the leaderboards could be exploited and it goes back to the wire transfer concept. Want to be #1 on profit ratio? Set up two accounts. One with $20 and the other with $1. Funnel all the money from the $20 account to the $1 account and, voila, 20 X profit ratio. If you withdraw all your money, does that remove you from the boards?

It's not too important I suppose. If and when tournaments happen, I imagine those will be the most reliable way to highlight the most skilled players.

jasonrohrer · 2014-12-15 16:35:21

Yeah, mostly for tournaments, when each player will have a single buy-in.

Though... I suppose that someone with multiple accounts could use one account to feed another, even in a tournament setting. Hmm...

It's funny, we kinda have the opposite collusion problem that we have in online poker. There, two people can share info to beat other people at the table. Here, two accounts can intentionally play together to pool their resources.

MAN! Why does this stuff always have to be so hard?!

And when there is some big prize on the line, people will be motivated to cheat like this. This may have just completely killed the idea of online tournaments...

iisjreg · 2014-12-15 17:37:34

Not necessarily.

This would normally work if the two accounts are playing each other. In a proper tournament, you would have randomised opponents. This person could still have multiple accounts entered into the competition (and I'm sure there are poker players that do this) but the impact is limited. Entry into a tournament could then be further restricted - perhaps by categories based on past performance (like divisions as mentioned above), or by recording more detailed information about a person, such as a real name linked to payments (the name would be kept private) so that you can only have account per name.

When it comes to real money and, in particular, "gambling", people want security and fairness, so I think they are more obliging to having more information recorded (as long as the information is secure, etc.).

J

jere · 2014-12-15 18:06:43

The concern at that point is not one person with multiple accounts but multiple people willing to collude and split the winnings. It reminds me very much of this incident during an iterated prisoner's dilemma contest:

Although tit for tat is considered to be the most robust basic strategy, a team from Southampton University in England (led by Professor Nicholas Jennings and consisting of Rajdeep Dash, Sarvapali Ramchurn, Alex Rogers, Perukrishnen Vytelingum) introduced a new strategy at the 20th-anniversary iterated prisoners' dilemma competition, which proved to be more successful than tit for tat. This strategy relied on cooperation between programs to achieve the highest number of points for a single program. The university submitted 60 programs to the competition, which were designed to recognize each other through a series of five to ten moves at the start.[10] Once this recognition was made, one program would always cooperate and the other would always defect, assuring the maximum number of points for the defector. If the program realized that it was playing a non-Southampton player, it would continuously defect in an attempt to minimize the score of the competing program. As a result,[11] this strategy ended up taking the top three positions in the competition, as well as a number of positions towards the bottom.

In the month or so that the leaderboards have been up, nobody has surpassed a 3x profit ratio. If a tournament was some sort of time limited free-for-all, 4 friends could easily beat this by identifying each other (through boards and moves) and then having everyone lose everything to a particular player. On the other hand, I could see the honest players playing more aggressively (doing stakes equal to their entire buy in) and potentially getting higher profits, but either way they'd still have to compete with the dishonest players.

If there was some sort of bracket and you were forced to play people (for a minimum number of rounds or until one player had 0 coins), it would largely mitigate that strategy above. The dishonest players still might encounter each other, but they wouldn't be able to avoid real opponents.

jasonrohrer · 2014-12-15 21:24:29

Yeah, I was hoping to make time-limited free-for-all work, but you're right that it is exploitable.

In your IPD example, the bots weren't even able to pick their partners, but still won through recognizing each other. So, even with randomly-assigned opponents, collusions could still happen whenever two cooperators are randomly assigned to each other. "If you ever see me, dump all your chips to me!"

An edge is an edge, unfortunately.

On the other hand, gaining that edge, however small we could make it through randomization, would still require multiple entry fees. But even if you never meet / recognize each other, you've paid 2x for 2 seats at the tournament, doubling your chances of winning if you each have the same skill, so worst case even if you have no edge, you're breaking even. Any edge you get, from the rare chance that you meet and inflate one bankroll, will push you beyond breaking even.

Thus, someone would be motivated to organize an unbounded number of collaborators to enter a tournament together. The limit would be the size of the prize pool, but normally, the prize pool would grow based on the number of entrants.

I wonder if the rake could be useful here somehow. If the rake is 40% of the pot (giving you only 20% of what your opponent pushed in, with 80% of what your opponent pushed in going to the house), wouldn't people prefer to play strangers over shared-purse collaborators?

If I have two accounts with X each, and I play myself all-in, then afterward, I have (1.2 X) of my 2x left, which is a 40% loss. Will that larger bank roll of 1.2 X now give me enough of an edge in the rest of the tournament to recoup my loss?

On the other hand, if I play all-in against someone else's X, afterward, I have 1.2 X again, but this time it's a 20% gain.

It seems like any rake over 25% would make this work, losing more to the rake than you're transferring to yourself---BUT, the question of the edge still remains. If the pot is 100X, and you gain a 1% edge by doing this, then you're ahead.

It seems like only a true bracket system, where bankrolls are not a factor, would stop this. A $5 entry fee, where after 30 minutes, the bottom 50% is culled, and the remaining folks are reset back to $5. Repeat until one person is left.

Someone could stay in longer by employing stooges, but eventually, all the stooges would be weeded out.

jere · 2014-12-24 16:14:28

Oh dear. The number is everywhere. 3 6 6 6 4 0

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jere · 2014-12-26 20:45:40

So I was curious how the winnings would affect the leaderboards. Obviously the dollar balance is changed and that's fine, but I was surprised to see that it changes the profit ratio board too. I'm guessing it's because winnings are treated the same as normal deposits.

jasonrohrer · 2014-12-26 21:56:47

Hmm... yeah, for now, I'm just paying out tournament prizes as manual deposits, which get logged as deposits.

I see that these have swamped people's profit ratios. I'll think about how to fix this. Should they count toward peoples profits? I guess they should, though it's a little weird, because they're not the same as the hard-fought profit of daily play.

But wait... if you use a $200 prize to keep playing, and you go up to $400, and lets say that you started with $20, your profit ratio shouldn't be computed based on the starting 20, right? That would be a profit ratio of 20x. Really, your profit ratio should be more like 2x at that point (the 20 has become irrelevant).

Really, once you have a larger bankroll from any outside source, your profit ratio should incorporate that into your baseline, right?

That's what's been done here, but it is strange to suddenly jump down on that leaderboard...

Pox · 2014-12-27 02:53:15

Neither seems totally satisfactory. My advice would be to keep track of a "virtual baseline" (and use it in the ratio calculation) which is increased 1:1 with a normal deposit, but in the case of a prize is increased only by prize/ratio. This would make tournament payouts leave the profit ratios invariant, which seems fairest to me.

jasonrohrer · 2014-12-27 03:00:51

Sorry... feeling thick after a long day. Can you spell that out a bit for me with an example?

Pox · 2014-12-27 04:17:26

After initial $5 deposit: vbaseline = 5, bankroll = 5, ratio = 1
After making $10 profit: vbaseline = 5, bankroll = 15, ratio = 3
After winning a $15 prize: vbaseline = 5 + 15/3 = 10, bankroll = 30, ratio = bankroll/vbaseline = 3
After another $10 deposit: vbaseline = 10 + 10 = 20, bankroll = 40, ratio = 2

So it's basically making the assumption "based on your past ratio of 3:1, you could have increased your bankroll by $15 by playing with an extra $5 from the start". This isn't quite true (we expect higher stakes games to have more difficult opponents) but it seems like a reasonable heuristic to me.

Last edited by Pox (2014-12-27 04:17:46)

jasonrohrer · 2014-12-27 08:08:52

Yeah, that makes sense.

This discussion makes me realize how much that profit ratio leaderboard discourages people from depositing more money. Your player above can win a prize with no harm done, but heaven forbid they deposit 10 more dollars.

Any ideas for metrics that are more sensible than profit ratio? Or ways to fix this?

mzo · 2014-12-27 11:23:24

I still like coins won (minus coins lost) as a metric. Not really a replacement for profit ratio though as it doesn't indicate anything about stakes and people playing fast and furious $0.10 games might do well on it.

Pox · 2014-12-27 11:43:30

You could probably calculate some normalized average profit based on how much one actually wagers rather than one's total deposits, but this would probably also favour certain stakes over others.

I think you should just make a variety of figures available, but not label any metric in particular as the "skill" leaderboard if that makes sense. I'd definitely like to see total coins and money wagered and won.

Last edited by Pox (2014-12-27 12:52:35)

jere · 2014-12-27 13:41:54

But wait... if you use a $200 prize to keep playing, and you go up to $400, and lets say that you started with $20, your profit ratio shouldn't be computed based on the starting 20, right? That would be a profit ratio of 20x. Really, your profit ratio should be more like 2x at that point (the 20 has become irrelevant).

I guess the logic checks out, but it's not currently realistic. That'd be very a long grind to $400 with the stakes people are willing to play. Besides, a lot of people will tend to immediately withdraw some of their winnings (both myself and 2nd place already have) because, well, I can't reasonably justify to my wife keeping hundreds of dollars locked up in a gambling game.

Having thought about it, inevitably profit ratio will favor the "poorer" players and profit will favor the "richer" players. And I suppose it's actually good that there are ladders for both groups to try to climb.

jasonrohrer · 2014-12-27 18:01:40

So... I've got some other stats to play with here.

I've been separately tracking "total lost" and "total won" for each account. So, if you come out of a table down, that adds to total lost, where if you come out ahead, that adds to total won for you. Your total buy in is also tracked.

SO, instead of comparing profit to your balance, which you may not actually be using all of (so a richer player is at a disadvantage, even if they are playing better), we should compare profit to "total risked".

(buyIn + won - lost) / buyIn

Thus, you can fairly compare the $0.01 player to the $100 player with this metric. It's still a profit ratio of sorts, but it's no longer relative to your balance, but instead relative to how much you have played.

CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

#1 2014-11-21 02:47:35

Leaderboards

#2 2014-11-22 12:30:58

Re: Leaderboards

#3 2014-11-22 18:14:43

Re: Leaderboards

#4 2014-11-22 19:19:54

Re: Leaderboards

#5 2014-12-12 01:29:22

Re: Leaderboards

#6 2014-12-12 01:51:56

Re: Leaderboards

#7 2014-12-12 03:52:05

Re: Leaderboards

#8 2014-12-12 13:09:29

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#9 2014-12-12 13:24:17

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#10 2014-12-14 22:46:42

Re: Leaderboards

#11 2014-12-15 16:35:21

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#12 2014-12-15 17:37:34

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#13 2014-12-15 18:06:43

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#14 2014-12-15 21:24:29

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#15 2014-12-24 16:14:28

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#16 2014-12-26 20:45:40

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#17 2014-12-26 21:56:47

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#18 2014-12-27 02:53:15

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#19 2014-12-27 03:00:51

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#20 2014-12-27 04:17:26

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#21 2014-12-27 08:08:52

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#23 2014-12-27 11:43:30

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#24 2014-12-27 13:41:54

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#25 2014-12-27 18:01:40

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